Flowers for Algernon, The Martian Child, and
now...The Speed of Dark. Congratulations to Elizabeth Moon on writing a
superb novel of autism set in the near future and giving voice to a
world normally left in silence.

The Speed of Dark is the story of Lou, an autistic
man in the near future, who is fairly well integrated into
society...though society would like nothing better than to erase his
different-ness and make him as unremarkable as possible.

It's told in first person, which immerses the reader
in Lou's perspective, but I found that I needed little encouragement.
Like many SF readers and Tech Types, I've got a hint of attention
deficit disorder, and the internal dialog of autism is immediately
accessible to anyone with any ADD. Either you can't pay attention to what
someone is saying, in Lou's case to the point of not being able to
understand the words, or you wind up focusing so intently on a computer
screen that hours pass unnoticed while you intuit patterns deep within
data readouts. None of that seems unusual to me.

Lou's inner life is presented as a comfortable world
full of interesting things, from watching the way light bounces off
shiny surfaces to learning the craft of fencing, getting together with
the other members of his autistic community, looking for the patterns in
data that a corporation has hired him and others like him to find. And
falling in love with a normal.

Lou is one of the last generation of autistics,
thanks to a genetic therapy that allows for a cure in the womb. As such,
he lives in a world that is shrinking around him, a world where there is
no place for the different. It's not an alien world in the far future,
but one that looks very much like here and now.

It is often said that if you don't stand up for
members of oppressed groups, no one will be left to stand up when they
come for you. I dislike that line of thought on the grounds that it
appeals to self interest rather than altruism, but heck, you probably
don't believe in altruism. A lot of the thrust of this book is to look
at the value of genuine humans rather than the engineered cattle that
post-humans might become. It's interesting that the forces that work to
dismiss the wildman aren't AI's after a post-Vingian singularity, where
machines have become our masters, but the economic forces of corporate
life. Actually, we'll probably look back and see that they were the same
thing, just not in the way we were expecting them to be.

The characters range from really nice people to
really self centered jerks, and both are sprinkled across gender and
venue. Lou is likes a woman at his fencing class,
Marjory, and she likes him back. Don, another fencing student, likes her
too, but he's a classic jerk and it's little surprise that Marjory
rebuffs him. At work, Lou and the other autistics perform intuitive
analysis that defy computers, for now anyway, but an ambitious manager
wants them all to act as experimental subjects for a new treatment to
cure them. Whether being what they are needs to be cured or not. Between
the stresses at work and away, Lou has plenty of conflict to deal with,
and best of all, he's tremendously likeable.

I'm distrustful of the author's ability to know the
inner workings of the autistic mind, though I gather that she did a lot
of research, getting to know both the facts and the people behind them.
It's just that I'm wary of presuming on the unique lives of these
people. I have a strong feeling that those of us who are not autistic
presume too much in our attempts to understand their world, even though
we may do it with friendly intent. Or perhaps not. The feeling nagged at
me while reading The Speed of Dark, the feeling that the author had made
it all too accesible at the cost of the reality. When Kubrick made 2001:
A Space Odyssey, he intentionally made it cold, sterile, and impersonal.
He made the aliens unfathomable. Years later, when 2010 was filmed, it
had none of those elements. The people and their conflicts were
immediately understandable. Even the elements from the earlier movie
that showed up were shown in warmer colors...including the change in
Discovery from pristine white to sulfur coated yellow. Or maybe that was
a coincidence. But the point it that Kubrick intended for the movie to
convey an inaccessibility to the audience...to get the idea that aliens
were really alien across. The latter movie lost that...but it was fun.

So, I have the feeling that The Speed of Dark loses
some of the alien quality of being autistic...but hopefully not too
much...and it's really enjoyable.

Elizabeth Moon's story takes things that were once
science fiction themes ("Fans are Slans!") and integrates them into a
world recognizable to fan and mundane alike. Like Mary Doria Russell, author of
The Sparrow, she is writing in a mainstream voice about Science
Fictional concerns. Unlike Ms. Russell, though, since she is well know
as an SF writer, she's has to swim a bit farther upstream to get where
she wants to go. It took SF Fans a while to catch on to The Sparrow, but
when they did, they loved it. I wish Ms. Moon equal success with the
normals.